Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have found that neurological evidence in the form of brain scans that show birds of a feather do flock together. The team says that neural and social signals in the mind align in terms of how we perceive both safety and risk.
Trends happen for a reason, whether it's twerking or the ice bucket challenge, or even your hidden cache of Ed Hardy clothing. And now, scientists have a better understanding of why--no matter how awful, embarrassing, or just plain weird the trend is.
The Virginia Tech study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess what we're thinking when we adopt trends (or reject them). The team found that our risk-taking preferences, inherent components of our nature, affect how we perceive and act on information we get from other people. The study's brain scans showed that the value of a gamble that we perceive rises after we see other people take that gamble. These same neural signals also predicted how likely it was that participants would go along with others' choices.
"You're more likely to follow the risky decisions of other people if you like to take risks, and you're more likely to follow the cautious decisions of other people if you tend to be cautious," says Pearl Chiu, an assistant professor at the Carilion Research Institute at Virginia Tech and senior author of the new study. "Our data explain why this happens. The choices that others make become more valuable than they would be otherwise, and our brains are wired to choose things that are more valuable."
The team's scientists used the fMRI to scan the brains of participants as they made gambling choices-both alone and after seeing what other players picked. The Virginia Tech team found that the choices of others influenced the choices made by participants-both safe and risky. Seeing another person take a risk, in other words, made it easier for other participants to take risks.
"It's important to remember that risk isn't inherently bad," coauthor, Brooks King-Casas says. "Some risks are healthy, like trying out for a team, and some aren't, like using dangerous drugs. Risk is uncertainty, and that appeals to some people more than others."
As an example, King-Casas describes a game in which players can either take a guaranteed win of $5 on each turn, or a 50 percent chance of winning $10 on each turn. On average both choices have the same outcome: players will end up with the same amount of money. The difference is that one option offers certainty and the other does not. The option that sounds better to you is influenced by your natural preferences for risk-taking, but it is also probably influenced by what you see others around you doing.
"Our preferences about risks extend to the type of peers who are more likely to influence our choices," says King-Casas. "This goes beyond negative peer pressure and demonstrates why strong social support systems are effective for encouraging healthy choices."
Paper co-author George Christopoulos, assistant professor at Nanyang Business School in Singapore, explained further.
"We've known for a long time that people are influenced by others," Christopoulos says. "This study offers a systematic experiment as well as a computational model to explain social decision-making."
The science behind choice becomes more complex depending on how much weight someone gives to the decisions of other people.
"No one knows how the gambles will play out, but people still tend to conform with others," says first author Dongil Chung. "The likelihood that you will be nudged depends on how much you value what others say."
It is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that carries out this social valuation process, a brain region known to encode values and rewards.
"The brain starts with your own preferences as a baseline for what to choose, and then, on top of that, the more your brain values information from other people, the more likely you are to follow their choices," says Chiu. "At the same time, if the other choices are too different from what you tend to do, your brain also detects that, and may be partly why the same social force is enough to budge some people but not others."
Both risk-takers and risk-averse people live in the same world. They see and process the same risky and safe information. This research shows that it's up to each individual to filter information and decide how and what to consider during the decision-making processes.
"As a relatively risk-averse person, I can be persuaded by my friends to go hiking," Chung says. "But no one is going to convince me to jump from one rooftop to another. For me, the risk is too extreme. Who you are is as important as who you are with."
And of course who you are probably has a lot to do with who you're with. The researchers published their findings Monday, May 18, in Nature Neuroscience.
